Winter Be My Shield (14 page)

He halted the horse he was leading and pulled his water-skin out from under his coat, where the warmth of his body kept it from freezing. As he took a swig the mare he was leading jogged his arm with her long nose and he spilled a stream of water over his cowl and into the furred front of his jacket. He snatched at her halter with a curse. ‘Hold still, you wretched old cow, or I'll stake you out for tiger bait.' She bared her teeth to snap at him, then rolled her eyes and tossed her head when he took a swipe at her nose. The spilled water was already freezing in his clothes and with a shiver he tucked the water-skin away and took hold of the horse's halter again.

Rhia was standing on the trampled path ahead, gazing back behind them and squinting into the pre-dawn gloom. ‘Watch yourself, Rhia,' Cam growled. ‘If you're going to stand around, please make sure you're off the cursed path.'

She winced. ‘My apologies, Cam. I was just checking on Isidro.'

‘He can shout for help if he needs it,' Cam said. The restive horse pawed at the ground with one forefoot, flapping the snowshoe buckled to its hoof. ‘Stop it, you miserable beast,' Cam said, and tugged on the halter rope. When he'd buckled the snowshoes on that morning he'd noticed they were showing signs of wear, but he wasn't sure how best to repair them. Garzen had been the one who understood such things.

The horse started forward again and Rhia hurried out of the way, turning a careful circle in her snowshoes. Within a few paces, the toboggan the mare was hauling ran up on something concealed beneath the snow and tipped, slewing down the slope towards the river. The ropes wrapped around the mare's hindquarters and she baulked, treading nervously in the twisted traces.

‘Oh, for pity's sake,' Cam said. ‘Rhia, hold her head.'

‘I'll help you —'

‘No, just hold her head! The wretched beast won't stand still for more than two moments together …'

He'd gone up to his knees in the snow before he got the sled turned on its right side again, but it was still angled down the slope, with its tow ropes dragging across the horse's hocks. With a sigh, Cam pulled the brake rope out from where it had been tucked within the sled wrapper. He played the rope out and wrapped the end around his fist. A couple of the other horses could be guided by voice, but Cam had let Lakua and Eloba take those and kept the most difficult one for himself. They only had three sleds — the rest of the gear had been loaded onto packhorses, which were left in the charge of Rhia and Brekan. ‘What happened to your horse?' he said as Rhia began to lead the stroppy mare forward.

‘Brekan took him. He said he could lead two as well as one.'

By walking higher along the slope and keeping the rope taut, Cam could keep the toboggan from sliding downwards. The two of them got the mare moving again, but Rhia kept looking back, paying so little attention to her feet she caught her snowshoes together and stumbled and they had to stop again.

‘Bright Sun, Rhia! Watch where you're going!'

She shot him a black look. ‘Someone should be watching Isidro with that whelp of a Blood-Mage. Only a fool sets a fox to watch over the weakest lamb. We should not let them fall so far behind.'

‘Isidro's not stupid,' Cam said. ‘I spoke to him this morning, before we moved out. I told him to be on his guard.'

‘He is weak and he is wounded. He is nothing but prey to her. Trust me, Cam. I have seen her like before. In Mesentreia, where I lived with my master, there was a lord who kept a mage, and the mage had an apprentice, a boy like her. The mage was a poor physician and my master was often called to attend to his victims when the lord wished to keep them alive. When we first met the boy he pleaded with us to help him escape and find his way back to his family. A few months later, he was begging for poison. Within a year he was wielding the irons and the knives beside his master. Their power consumes them, Cam. They are no more than beasts, enslaved by their lust for blood and pain.'

He'd heard such tales before. They were lucky in a way that Kell was so powerful. He wouldn't tolerate any other Blood-Mages in Ricalan. It meant they had only Kell and his apprentice to worry about: there were
no other mages who would try to poach Sierra for themselves. ‘What happened to him?' Cam said. ‘The apprentice?'

‘He turned on his master and the mage killed him,' Rhia said. ‘This one is already far gone. You saw how she fed off the men who fell. Isidro would be a great prize for her — she will feed from him like a tick sucking blood. I am afraid for him, Cam.'

 

It was still dark enough to allow Sierra to ride with her eyes uncovered and she watched Isidro's back as he rode. He left the reins slack on his horse's neck, guiding it with his knees and heels while he kept his left hand wrapped around the pommel of the saddle. He rarely glanced up from the path, even when a snowshoe hare burst from a tangle of branches beside his horse's feet and bolted across the track. It was only when his horse snorted and tossed its head in sudden fright that he stirred himself to look around.

The path Cam had chosen was not an easy one. The smoothest route would have them following the frozen riverbed, which provided a flat and unobstructed road, but one that meandered back and forth across the countryside rather than cutting straight as a crow flies. Instead the path they took cut across the bends in the river, and every mile or so they had to scramble up or down a riverbank over jagged, slippery ice or a thin crust of snow that broke under their horses' weight, even with the snowshoes.

Every shift of weight, every awkward step, sent a jolt of pain through Isidro's broken arm and a ripple of energy along Sierra's nerves. If they were attacked, at least she'd have power to fight, but she carried so much that her mind was buzzing with it. She felt drunk on power, giddy with it and horribly ashamed that another person's suffering could make her feel this way.

When she couldn't bear it any more, she kicked her horse forward and rode up to Isidro's side. He barely acknowledged her, glancing up only briefly; his face incurious and his eyelids heavy with weariness and pain.

The events of that first night still weighed on her mind. Isidro didn't seem to remember it at all but to Sierra it was still vivid and fresh. She had come within a hair's breadth of killing him, but afterwards  … afterwards he had been free of pain for the span of half a day. And last night, when Garzen died she felt that flow of power again. He had been
only minutes away from death, but she had known even then that she could have killed him if she wished, could have drained him through the conduit of power created by the wound. That time she had known when it crossed the line into dangerous ground and she choked off the flow before she could drain the power that kept his heart beating. The last moments he had, though brief, had been free of pain and fear.

It was no wonder that Kell had always taken such pains to chain her out of reach of his subjects. He must have known what she could do, that with a touch she could render all his preparations and his rituals useless and end the pain of his victim, even if only temporarily.

‘This must be good for you,' Isidro said after a long moment, glancing down at the bulge of his arm beneath his coat. ‘A constant flow of energy, isn't that how it works?'

‘More or less,' she said. ‘Doesn't Rhia have some poppy? I'm sure I heard her mention it earlier …'

‘She's already given me as much as she dares.'

Sierra bit her lip. She couldn't let him go on like this, not if there was some chance she could help. ‘Isidro, stop for a moment,' she said, reining in and pulling off her glove. She had to remind herself it was not
her
arm that was broken, that it was not
her
wrist that would explode into agony if she tried to flex it. ‘I think I can help you. Give me your hand.'

He stopped, but did not lift his hand from the pommel. He merely sat and watched her with narrowed eyes. ‘What do you mean? How can you help?'

‘The night we first spoke,' Sierra said. ‘Do you remember any of it?'

He began to shake his head, but then went very still. ‘I remember that I slept for about a day afterwards. It was the first time since I came round that I slept without poppy …' He leaned forward and fixed her with his piercing gaze. ‘What did you do?'

‘I-I'm not really sure,' she said. The tremor in her own voice made her wince. ‘I didn't mean to do anything — but I know you had no pain for hours and it didn't come back completely until the next day.'

‘Last night,' Isidro said. ‘With Garzen. He was in peace before he died.'

Part of her wished she'd never mentioned it. Isidro was more forgiving of her than she had any right to expect, given what he'd suffered, but this might be more than he could take. Her power was a twisted thing
and Sierra could understand why decent folk shied away from her. ‘I … I think I took you too far that night. I didn't understand what I was doing and I didn't know how to stop. It was better with Garzen, but he was so weak … he would have died quickly no matter what I did.'

Isidro laid his hand on his ruined arm, bound to his chest beneath his coat. Sierra could feel it throbbing and the power pouring off it was like heat from a stove. ‘What are you saying?' he said. ‘You can make it stop?'

‘I think so. And I'm almost certain I can do it without killing you.'

‘Ha!' He smiled, but there wasn't much humour in it. ‘If you put it that way, it seems I've not got much to lose. What do you want me to do?'

She tried to nudge her horse closer, but she wasn't much of a rider and she and the horse both knew it. The horse stamped a foot and refused to move, so using his heels and his knees Isidro coaxed his mount into sidling up to hers.

‘Take off your glove,' Sierra said, removing her mitten and the glove beneath. It was another operation Isidro had not quite mastered with one hand, so he took the tip of the mitten in his teeth and pulled it off. The glove beneath presented him with more of a problem, but Sierra took hold of his wrist and peeled it off herself.

The moment their hands brushed, a blue spark jumped between them. Isidro hissed at the sting and pulled back. His horse twitched and stamped as though bitten by a fly, but Sierra's mount reared up and shied violently away. Sierra was already off balance and leaning towards Isidro and as the horse shied she slid from the saddle and landed in the snow with a whoosh of breath. Her mare leapt away with reins and stirrups flapping and bolted towards the rest of her herd. At the noise of it another beast grazing unseen on the slope above also took fright and ran, crashing away through the bare trees. In the gloom it was nothing but a dark blur, but from the sound it was large enough to be an elk or a reindeer.

‘Are you alright?' Isidro asked, grabbing for the reins as his own horse danced away from her.

‘No harm done,' Sierra said, picking herself up. ‘I should have guessed she would spook. I killed the man who was riding her.' She brushed some snow from her coat and then reached out and took Isidro's bare hand.

The shock almost knocked her flat again, a sudden doubling of sensation as she felt his body overlaid on hers. She experienced the
peculiar rush of her power just as he did, felt it as clearly as if it were her own nerves sensing it, an odd mixture of heat and cold that shot up his arm and earthed itself somewhere near his heart.

The pain drained from his arm like a water-skin punctured with a needle, to be replaced with an icy numbness. Isidro gasped and went rigid. She could feel his muscles clenching as he fought the drain of power. He had some talent for mage-craft himself but it was weak and utterly undeveloped and he lacked the strength to mount any real resistance.

Once his arm was numb, Sierra tried to withdraw. Her power flexed within her — it didn't want to let him go, but this time Sierra was ready and, when it rose up to try to take control, she forced it down and broke the contact with a wrench. Isidro's own latent power struck at her, a stinging slap that almost made her lose her grip, and for a long moment she could do nothing but focus on bringing all her raging energy to heel.

Once she was able to look up, Isidro was doubled over in his saddle, his left hand white-knuckled on the pommel, and he was drawing deep, shuddering breaths.

‘How does it feel?' Sierra said.

‘Well,' he said, and loosened his hand from the saddle with an effort. ‘I won't say it was pleasant, but …' He ran a cautious hand over the bulge of his splinted arm. ‘It seems to have worked. I don't feel a thing. It's like it's turned to wood.'

He reached inside his coat and through the layers of clothing, as though to reassure himself that his arm was still flesh and blood. Sierra took the horse's reins and waited, holding her breath, not entirely sure what she was afraid of. After a moment Isidro straightened and pulled all the layers back in place. ‘It worked,' he said with a note of wonder in his voice. ‘It doesn't hurt.'

There was the sound of hoofbeats on the track ahead and they both looked up to see Cam coming towards them at a trot, mounted on Sierra's mare. His frown of concern turned to exasperation as he saw them standing there together with a conspiratorial air. ‘What's going on?' he said. ‘I looked around and saw the mare careening towards us as if her tail was on fire. She almost knocked Rhia down.' He reined in and swung down from the saddle, but the mare began to pull away before he even touched the ground, snorting and tossing her head.

‘She spooked when Sierra dropped a spark,' Isidro said. ‘She's not spent much time on horseback and it looks as if the mare's set against her now. It might be wise to swap her for another.'

‘The others are all well ahead of us,' Cam said. ‘The only other horse nearby is the stroppy cow I'm driving and I doubt either of you could cope with her.'